Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Sometimes I call them conversations because people wonder why I talk so much and if it’s just an interview, so it’s a conversation. In fact, Irene has a laminated paper here that she holds up from time to time and says you’re talking too much. Anyway, here we are. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page. I’ve done well over 400 of these now and if you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. My guest today is Kimberly Braun. Kimberly is a minister. She has an MA in theology, I believe, right?
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rick: CSP, what’s that?
Kimberly: Certified Speaking Professional. It’s an honorary certification through the NSA for my years of public speaking and inspirational talks.
Rick: NSA is the National Security . . .
Kimberly: I know, isn’t that funny? The National Speaking Association.
Rick: Oh, the Speaking Association, okay.
Kimberly: They talked about changing that.
Rick: Yeah, you wonder. And you’re a meditation coach, and you have been impelled from within your contemplative experiences from the age of five. Over ten of your years were spent as a Carmelite monastic nun, and just skipping along here. Okay, we’ll cover some more of this as we go through the interview. So, it’s funny, I was reading your book about your time as a Carmelite nun and I was reading, okay, burning the potatoes, kissing the floor, cross-country skiing out to the compost pit and things like that. And I said, “The book’s almost over. When is she going to leave this convent?” And then I got to the end and I realized, “Oh, it’s a trilogy. I just read the first part.”
Kimberly: Yes, I know. Some people feel really teased by that.
Rick: Yeah. So, we’ll have to get into the whole story here. We’ll have to do the . . . who’s that guy that used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story”?
Kimberly: Yes, I will reveal some of the story.
Rick: All right, we’ll see how much we can tease out of you. In any case, you mentioned you started having profound mystical experiences from the age of five. So, let’s start there. What were some of your earliest recollections of profound spiritual experiences?
Kimberly: Right. I think that children, and I would include myself in that, are experiencing more of a merging in the joy of just being alive. You know, there’s an innocence and an openness. So in that way, I think that a lot of what I was experiencing isn’t incredibly unique. But what I can point to that seems to be notable is that I would oftentimes find myself in these incredible states of joy that would be in ritual, because I grew up Catholic, which was very powerful for me. It would be out in nature. It would be in the simplest things happening within my family, and time would seem to stop. And it’s difficult to put words to it, because as the time seemed to stop, from within and without, everything would move into this very timeless place and there would be a knowing, but it was a knowing without my mind. It was what I would really call a state of deep bliss, and it was very informative. I would always come out of those instances, sometimes they would last just for a couple minutes and sometimes they would last for long periods, like a half hour. They escalated in my late teens to many hours. But back then when I was little, I would always walk out of them and there was this incredible excitement of feeling like I knew what life was about. And it gave me a lot of meaning, a lot of purpose, a lot of direction, and it has been both a wind in my sails and a rudder that I’ve never actually been able to move away from. So even in my dark moments it’s always been in the framework of those existential experiences.
Rick: Nice. Well a lot of little kids actually do have pretty profound experiences, but I think there might be a correlation, I think I may have seen a correlation in all the people I’ve interviewed, between having really profound experiences as a young child, such as seeing angels or unity consciousness or something like that, and a later awakening in one’s 20s maybe or 30s or whatever, later on in life. It seems that the people who have a profound spiritual shift very often have kind of more extraordinary pronounced spiritual experiences when they’re little.
Kimberly: I would believe that I was experiencing from when I was three onwards a sense of the immaterial being as real as the material, and I was also experiencing healing gifts through me. My mom and dad were involved in a charismatic movement that was very grassroots, the laying on of hands and praying in tongues, and there was a sense of openness to possibility and potential in our family, and they were so rooted in their own genuineness towards truth and kindness that I think it set the stage for me as a young child to be tasting these things in myself, to be having them happen within me.
Rick: Yeah, it’s a fortunate birth. There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna asked Lord Krishna, “Well what happens if a person is on the path to enlightenment and dies?” Then Krishna says, “Well they live generally a long period of time in the celestial realms and then they’re born into a pure and illustrious family, or if they’re really fortunate, into a family of yogis.” So it seems like there’s different degrees of auspiciousness in terms of the birth one can have.
Kimberly: Yeah, I think that plays a big part and I’m super grateful. I’ve always felt as though even encountering my mom and dad, and of course you know as a child you have the idealistic that they’re perfect, and now I know they’re not perfect, but they’re wonderful people.
Rick: It took me too long to realize that mine weren’t, but anyway.
Kimberly: But I could feel something bright in their innocence, even when I was four years old I can remember looking at them and it was a feeling quality of this true seeking. They didn’t sit around and have deep philosophical conversations, they weren’t doing specific things that would lead to that, it was just in their being and I could see their relationship with themselves and the world and it let me taste that even more within myself. It took me a number of years but I realized the compassion that I was tasting in them was actually the compassion that was within me.
Rick: Right. Yeah, I just want to add one thing to what I just said a second ago, which is that there are exceptions to that generality I just made. I’ve interviewed people who were sexually abused as children and had all kinds of horrific things happen and they actually feel in retrospect that in a roundabout sort of way that was instrumental in their awakening, that was like the medicine they needed in order to jar them out of whatever into a deeper seeking of higher knowledge.
Kimberly: Right, I think oftentimes when we experience a “no” within ourselves it’s because we already have a knowing of the “yes.” One of my systematics professors in my theology and seminary training, a brilliant man, and he would say from time to time, he’d look at us down in the class, he had this mannerism that was really imitable, and he would say, “There’s a fine line between an atheist and a mystic, there is a fine line.” And here you are in a very constructed Catholic seminary training, and our training taught us that mysticism blasts open and our “no’s” that are happening when we’re saying, “It’s not that, no to God, no to that,” it’s because we’re tasting something of the truth and we’re simply . . . it can’t be that because it’s got to be something else that I’m wired for.
Rick: Interesting, let’s probe this a little bit more because I find that interesting, “a fine line between an atheist and a mystic.” I actually really enjoy listening to talks by Sam Harris and some of his atheistic compadres because they’re so darn intelligent, and in Sam Harris’s case he’s like a practicing Buddhist and he’s done tons of meditation, two years in retreat and all kinds of stuff, and yet he’s an atheist, and I think, “God, look at your hand buddy, I mean, just look at one cell in it and tell me that there isn’t some incredible intelligence orchestrating this universe.” But also, I mean, the very fact of saying one is an atheist seems to me very unscientific because you’re taking an absolute stance rather than a hypothetical one which would still be open to experiential exploration.
Kimberly: Yeah, I love that, I love the way that you put that, and I think truly that somebody. . . the people that I’m speaking to that are atheists are usually ones that have had experiences that are just leading them more into the unknown. And I know that technically that’s not what an atheist is, but most of the atheists that feel that are really committed. And it’s that unknown piece, and in that unknown piece is the dissolution of everything, the dismantling of the constructs that our minds set up that give us an idea of who we are and what life is about. And when all of that is really shaken open I think that we are then in the Divine embrace.
Rick: But how can they call themselves atheists? Why not agnostics? I mean isn’t that a bit like saying, “I don’t believe in black holes.” Alright, but maybe let’s see what experiential evidence there may be for black holes. So why can’t God be something that is open to experimental investigation?
Kimberly: Well, I’d be interested in your thoughts. You know, my thought is that as human beings we feel more solid when we take a stance. It gives us, even if the security is ill-founded, it does give us a little bit of ground to stand on from which we could perhaps surrender into something a bit more, and I do think a lot of these choices that we’re making around the stances are . . . people think they’re logical based, but I’m convinced they’re emotional and more energetic based, and that has its own line of logic to it.
Rick: Yeah, it’s as if they’re building a sort of superstructure of logic to rationalize the emotional or energetic foundation that underlies it.
Kimberly: That’s where I would stand, if you will, in relation to that. I have an incredible amount of easefulness around the constructs that we set up for these deeper yearnings that go on in our souls. I feel incredibly blessed that I was broken open within a tradition and now I’m not within a tradition as the fruit of surrendering into a construct that was a gateway for my own mystic side, if you will, and the consciousness that I am coming into form. So I have this real softness when I hear people land in certain places, even if that landing is just a steppingstone and not the final goal.
Rick: Yeah, as you probably know, a lot of spiritual traditions talk about the value of not knowing. I think in Buddhism there’s a thing of “don’t know mind” or something like that, because it keeps you in a state of openness. Nisargadatta said that he considers the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity to be hallmarks of spiritual maturity.
Kimberly: Yes, and when we’re comfortable with the pathless path, that there is a path to the pathlessness.
Rick: Well it’s interesting that we’re taking this little tangent because I’m definitely not premeditated, we’re just getting into it here. But I was thinking about the comparison perhaps between an ardent atheist and an ardent believer in Jesus or Muhammad or whoever. It’s like there’s a fundamental similarity to them both in light of what you said a minute ago in that they’re holding on to something to assuage some kind of fear or for the sake of some kind of security that they find in their ardency.
Kimberly: I think so, and I think there’s a place for that. I think as human beings it’s a stage, and if I look at the human species I think we’re a little bit like three-year-olds and four-year-olds. I feel like we’re very young in our development, and to hold on to something in this time-space continuum while we experience that we’re much more than that makes a lot of sense. And if we can provide opportunities where people can be okay and be accepted for holding on and be brought to the limit of that comfort zone and have a direct dynamic experience of the ineffable and the unknown, then I think that’s what then breaks us open. And in really simple terms in scripture we have, “It’s love that casts out fear,” and I know that that’s a very general statement, but I think that love casts out all fear is a very succinct and powerful way to put what I just said in bigger terms.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good and I appreciate what you’re saying. I’ve interviewed the head of the Hare Krishna movement twice, just to take an example, and those guys really believe in what they’re into, and I think, fine, Billy Graham just died, he really believed in what he was into, great. It’s like everybody’s path is appropriate for them at their stage of development and you don’t yank it away from them. I’m not meaning to sound wiser and holier than anybody who’s really attached to some perspective. I’m sure I have my attachments, but we grow out of them naturally and it’s really not anyone’s job to wrest it from them.
Kimberly: I would say that in my own life, even though I don’t think that courage is an operative word because I’m very much a lover archetype, so if there was kind of an identification to my path it would be this sensibility that life is a dynamic love relationship unfolding. And so using my language with that and my construct, I experience it and so I move from it, so I feel like I’m moving from banquet to banquet to banquet, even though externally it looks like I’m going into something and leaving something. But the bigger change for me was interestingly leaving the monastery and not staying in the monastery, because staying in the monastery I was so caught up in so many ecstatic experiences with God that it was the natural progression to the love affair, you know, when you are head over heels and on fire and your whole life is changing, you’ve just got to have it. There’s an impelling force there that it doesn’t take courage, it doesn’t take thinking about it, it doesn’t take weighing the options, you’ve just got to do it. And there was the same impelling force in leaving but it was way more sophisticated and subtle. It was a light illumination and it was the “this is the next step in my love affair.” But externally it took a lot more courage because the transition was huge to step out on so many levels, emotionally, psychologically, physically.
Rick: Yeah, well we’ll take this as an introduction and we’re going to loop back and build up to the point where you just discussed, because we kind of leaped ahead. I just want to add that I was kind of in a similar situation where I was in the monastic program in the TM movement for 15 years, although it wasn’t anywhere near as monastic as what you were doing. But when I decided to leave, it was like people were coming to my door and looking at me with jaws dropping like, “What in the hell are you doing?” And so there was a certain intuitive knowing that this is what I got to do. But anyway, enough about me.
Kimberly: Exactly the same, right?
Rick: So let’s loop back and talk about how you ended up in a monastery in the first place and probably there are some steps before that that we want to cover in terms of the kinds of experiences you were having and what led up to the decision to enter the . . . it’s not a monastery, it’s a . . . what is it called?
Kimberly: No, it’s a monastery.
Rick: What’s the other word? The female . . .
Kimberly: Convent.
Rick: Convent?
Kimberly: Yeah, but a convent has a different sensibility of lifestyle. So the Carmelites are eremitical, meaning that they’re devoted to contemplative lifestyle, so Carmelite monastic living is the same for women and men. And I would say that women oftentimes are living a more monastic lifestyle, whereas a convent will oftentimes involve much more relationship with society.
Rick: Okay, so we left you at five years old having profound, timeless, blissful experiences, but you didn’t join the monastery until you were in your 20s. So, with an appropriate amount of detail, what happened between those two ages?
Kimberly: Right, well my healing gifts and my prayer gifts became larger in junior high school. I began experiencing gifts like the gift of prophecy, the gift of healing through prayer for others. I was having a lot of . . . when I would lay in bed at night and my room would become lit up in all sorts of different ways, and I experienced the presence . . . I’ve always been very close to Jesus and Mary, and so I would experience their presence, angels, loved ones, and a lot of phenomena, if you will, but in a much more tempered way than happened later on. And then I went through a really big dark night, the darkest night. I’ve had other dark moments, but I went through a really big dark night when I was 16, 17it started, right around there, and it’s very practical. It was a division inside myself of understanding how I could be passionate and how I could be spiritual, and it was a conundrum because I’m very passionate by nature in every way. I’m passionate about causes, I’m passionate about idealistic thought, I’m passionate about exploring the world, I’m passionate about sex, I’m passionate about . . . like I’m just a passionate person, and experiencing that quality in myself plunged me into a real confusion in relationship to God, and I didn’t find any mentors.
Rick: Felt like you were selling out or compromising or something.
Kimberly: It felt like it wasn’t okay to be who I was, and it plunged me kind of into hell because you can’t . . . when you’re in a true dark night you can’t work it out in your mind and you need to wait for something to be revealed and cultivate, and I didn’t have an understanding through mentorship or anything of how to hold space for myself. So it was very hard, I mean I developed all sorts of health issues and all sorts of things, and I honestly think that I would have died had I not come through it, it was very dramatic.
Rick: You were just really struggling.
Kimberly: Very much, and then I had this moment that was completely out of body and I experienced a state of freedom that I can’t put into words, and that freedom dissolved all the identities around all these different things. But again, it didn’t happen in my mind, if it was based anywhere it was very, very heart-centered. There was an experience of freedom in that I could be here, I could not be here, like none of it mattered, and I was utterly free to live. And in that moment that whole dilemma went away, it’s never resurfaced, and a part of my practical knowing is to be spiritual, is to be a living desire of consciousness. At our very center is Eros, and if we are the desire of God we are also its fulfillment, and so to live a life that is in the healthiest sense of the word from that soul desire, then we become who we’re meant to be. So that’s a lot of language around something that was not . . . I wouldn’t talk about it that way at the time, but after that moment, wow, I was like knocked off my butt. I mean it was like, it was being pursued by God. I mean, the heat and the heaviness, I couldn’t get enough time in solitude, and then even when I was with people, the spirits being that they were would appear to me, everything I was doing was this experience of Christ and Christ consciousness, and I was changing and maturing in it in dramatic ways. I would spend hours and hours lost in these states, and it had a lot . . . They were different each time, so I won’t give a lot of language to what they were like, but they were incredible and it was impossible to do anything other than to surrender into this. And that went on from when I was 19 to about six months before I entered the monastery, and I was trying to find a spiritual director out in California and I couldn’t find anybody because I came off, I think, as too ordinary for all this to be happening. And so, the mature people that I was turning to were disbelieving.
Rick: They thought maybe you just had a vivid imagination or something.
Kimberly: Yeah, one guy thought I was falling asleep. I would swoon, my body couldn’t always sustain it. It was a very Teresa of Avila type of experience, and that was his question to me, because I would take a step and then I was completely swooning, taken up for these long periods. And he’s like, “Now, are you sure you aren’t falling asleep?”
Rick: Yeah. And did Teresa have that kind of experience too?
Kimberly: Yes. And that’s where I found my friend, because I gave up on trying to find any human community to talk to about it, and I was nervous anyway, because I felt . . . at that time in my life I felt very unworthy and humbled and undone, and so I was scared a little to talk about it all, because I was like, “Who am I?” That was that feeling that doesn’t exist in me anymore, because I feel that we are all pulsing that, and so my relationship to it is all different. But I gave up, and one of my roommates, a week later after I totally gave up, put Teresa of Avila’s autobiography of her life. And I sat down and I started reading it, and I was weeping because everything she was describing was happening to me. And even around that time I had a bilocation experience because someone was in need of prayer, I was having all of this, and all of this was happening.
Rick: So tell us about that. So you were sitting in your room or something and you also showed up somewhere else, observable to other people?
Kimberly: Yes, there was this little girl, she was an Oriental girl. I can’t quite describe it, I shared it with a spiritual friend who knew it was true, and all I can say was that I was hot, and everything was etheric-like. And then I was where I was, and then I was with this girl, she was really in anguish, something had happened that upset her and I did not know what that was.
Rick: Did she see you or you just saw her?
Kimberly: No, she felt the support.
Rick: She felt, but did she actually see you sitting there and later on she saw you?
Kimberly: She recognized, well I never saw her again.
Rick: Oh, I see.
Kimberly: Yeah, because I went somewhere.
Rick: So a subtle body, something or other happened and you . . .
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah. And she was consoled by that experience, and then once that encounter was over then I was clearly just in my room. So I was having a lot of things happen.
Rick: A lot of stuff going on.
Kimberly: Yeah, a lot of stuff. So I found refuge, Teresa of Avila, and even though I grew up Catholic I really didn’t know about the Carmelites. And then shortly after that somebody put Teresa of Lisieux’s book in my hands and then I discovered John of the Cross, and there was a visceral knowing that these were my really close friends. So I began to grow in friendship with them, and as that happened then it made it really simple to join the monastery, and the right monastery came about. It took a long time, I really wanted to go fast and it was meant to go slow.
Rick: Do you know Frances Bennett by any chance?
Kimberly: Yes.
Rick: Okay, so I just got a question here from Frances. She says, “I had an amazingly similar background experience as you, deep mystical stuff as a child, entering monastic life in my 20s, dark night in late teens. I have come to feel very strongly that a lot of my deep spiritual interest coming at such an early age with such intensity and then entering monastic life was due to spiritual practice interest in previous lives. Have you come to that conclusion as well, Kimberly?”
Kimberly: That’s a really great question. I would say that there has been an earnestness in my search. When I’ve experienced other past lives there have been elements of that. I travel lightly in the past life view, so I think it’s very true as a plane of consciousness to understand our evolution into form. So I think there is that thread happening and I have found more tracing back to Goddess experiences, to energetically vibrating Kuan Yin and vibrating Kali. So I even think that that vibrational signature has been more leading and formative to me in this life than even some of my past life.
Rick: Kundalini experts that I’ve interviewed have said that Kundalini can awaken over the course of several lifetimes. So like it can awaken in one life and then you die and when you come into the next life it’s already awakened to that degree and then it just kind of . . . they sometimes refer to it as “she” continues the progress that picked up from where it left off.
Kimberly: I love that.
Rick: When you say all this energetic stuff going on and just huge surges of energy and this and that, that’s kind of what it sounds like.
Kimberly: It does and what I was experiencing more than a rising, I know in traditional energetic constructs there’s a rising through the spine up into the enlightenment, into the mind. It’s interesting my experiences in my late teens felt like somebody was cracking my head open in a joyful way and it would go like this and then I’d be flooded from my crown chakra down. And then the outflow was that my health in my mind, body, and heart increased as the fruit of what was happening here versus some of the other energy movements that happened. I think they’re all just different pathways and I think our personalities and our cultures, and that we have something of a collective consciousness that sets us up and the real invitation is our saying “yes” to becoming consciousness in its full form.
Rick: Yeah, based on what you just said I want to read something that somebody sent me in an email this week. The difference between the yogic path where the consciousness prepares the body as it moves up the spine, hopefully culminating in a Shiva-Shakti reunion, and the mature Vedantic path where the energy comes down the mountain from the head to the heart to the aura or gut to rest in being. Two vastly different movements which is why not all yogis become jnanis, some stay up and play in the field of consciousness. It’s not automatic that they will return to the body. Interesting.
Kimberly: Very interesting. We all have our challenges and first I want to thank you Francis for that question and I bow to your experiences. I would say if I haven’t had any challenge I’ve wondered if I just wouldn’t do more good not being here in this world, you know. So I mean I know I’m meant to be here, there’s no question.
Rick: Yeah, because you’re here.
Kimberly: Because I’m here.
Rick: That’s proof.
Kimberly: Right, but that has been my bigger challenge, you know.
Rick: Feeling like you didn’t belong in this God-forsaken realm or something.
Kimberly: No, I’m part and parcel human, but that sense of really landing, you know, really like, “Ah, I have to be here.” Because if we are very subtle in who and what we are as well sometimes I’ve wondered, “Well, you know, couldn’t I do greater good just not being in the body anymore?”
Rick: Yeah, reminds me of an old Stephen Wright joke, he had this deadpan way of speaking, he said, “I broke up with my girlfriend, I wasn’t really into meditation and she wasn’t really into being alive.”
Kimberly: Well, I had a great consolation. In 2007 I was straddling, I was still Catholic and I was . . . get this . . . I was on ministerial staff at a church with two Carmelite priests who really esteemed me as a fellow minister even though I wasn’t a priest. And so there was great collegiality there, but I was also keenly aware that my experience crossed all different boundaries, it was so universal. If I could learn to hear the heart of every person before me I will feel that I have become more skilled in who I’m meant to be. So my language morphs and shapeshifts to be at the service of others. So I was beginning to straddle being on ministry staff and doing things out in the local community and starting to lead retreats that were much more universal and essence-based. And as I was doing that I experienced my mind . . . I just lost my train of thought.
Rick: Just now?
Kimberly: Just now.
Rick: Oh, well you’re talking about how back in 2007 you were serving in a ministerial capacity and you were becoming more ecumenical, I think, more kind of multifaceted and growing out of just the one channel you had been living in and . . . I don’t know, am I jogging your memory?
Kimberly: Non-dual Tantra, non-dual Tantra. I found that my Christian mysticism was expressed very well in the writings that I was finding through non-dual Tantra.
Rick: Like Kashmir Shaivism kind of thing?
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah. And that broadened my language out, but it gave me honey because for the mystics and how I can read them and experience them and feel at home, that was giving for me a practical articulation of the nature of reality and ourselves as both the revealing of awareness and the concealment that’s still in the process of revealing. The notion that in the end God will be all in all. The Teilhard de Chardin, that there is this pulsing omega point and everything is returning in that Christ consciousness.
Rick: Yeah, many ways we can go right now, but I’m thinking that there has to be concealment in order for there to be revealing, otherwise . . . and I would go so far as to say there has to be concealment in order for there to be a universe. Somehow the very process of manifestation necessitates concealment and so there’s this hide-and-seek game going on, you know, where things get concealed and then forms eventually evolve which are sophisticated enough to break through the concealment and arrive back at that T. S. Eliot quote about arriving back from whence we started and knowing the place for the first time.
Kimberly: Yes, the ever-ancient, ever-new. There’s a . . . speaking to that and I think what I love about the sophistication of that system and I would consider myself very much a beginner, so I’m going to lead a Tantra of Christ workshop soon as a way of exploring some of these texts side-by-side. But what I love about it is it challenges us to move away from this way we want to judge ourselves and reality and it takes a great strength and vulnerability to truly move away from the right-wrong way of looking. I’m bad, I’m good, this is right, this is wrong, that is light, that is dark. And when we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to say, “Ah, consciousness might be showing up in concealment and in revealing and that’s part of the process, how can I assent to that?” That takes a lot of courage.
Rick: Yeah, but . . . well firstly as a footnote on this Kashmir Shaivism point, my interview with Paul Mueller-Ortega and also Igor Kufayev would be good references for those interested in Kashmir Shaivism. But just this morning I received an email from somebody about Pema Chodron’s, I would say, I haven’t even read the whole article yet, but rationalization of Trugyam Rinpoche’s behavior and which involved excessive drinking and sexual promiscuity and so on. Quite often this stuff is rationalized as crazy wisdom or just sort of, I don’t know, living the fullness of life or something like that, but I think it’s often a rationalization and I tend to regard such people as half-baked. I don’t know whether you’re alluding to that kind of thing or not, but one just has to temper this notion of experiencing everything in the name of living life fully with some sort of moral or ethical values, I think.
Kimberly: Yeah, and I think . . . I’m not sure I feel qualified to speak to that, the behavior and all of that. I think the real litmus test is, is there dissipation of energy happening or is there magnification of energy happening?
Rick: In one’s own experience you mean?
Kimberly: Yeah, and is there an expansion? Because if we’re a scale expanding cosmos, then I believe that the human being is meant to expand within it. But the concealment, I think what I’m speaking to is, let’s take this notion. This is a really simple one. Very popular in Christian circles is the admonition that it’s better to give than to receive. Well that can sometimes be used in the context of contracting the human being to feel guilty if they actually participate in the receiving part of things. You know, it sets up a moral standard that has a black and white quality to it, instead of recognizing that there’s a dance and that the concealment part is the human being being vulnerable enough to ask the deeper question, “What’s at the service of the soul desire here?” So that’s a bit more of what I’m speaking to is that we don’t know ourselves, and we don’t really know the universe and when we’re willing to hold that and ask hard questions so that more can be revealed, then more becomes expansive and we’re living from a soul desire place, we’re living from a place that’s aligned with morality and ethics and things like that.
Rick: Yeah, there are several things I think you just said. One is that morality and ethics can be kind of codified and one can try to live by “the book says this, therefore I should do that,” but it also can become a thing where one is in tune with cosmic intelligence, if you want to use that phrase, and acting according to its dictates spontaneously, which may or may not appear to correlate with what the books say, but which you know in your heart of hearts is the right course to take.
Kimberly: Yes, and that’s a very dynamic way I think to show up as consciousness in this world, and I think it’s living that dynamic life that gives that soft interplay between concealment and reveal. I love in Psalm 19, I’m paraphrasing, it’s line 3 and 4, but the first phrases are “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” And it’s 3 and 4, “day unto day tells the story and night unto night reveals the message.” So if we look at our lives as an ever-flowing day and night, or in Kali terms, if we look at our lives as a conception, birth, living, destruction, if we have these movements and these cycles, there’s something always going on there in the divine unfolding, and often times the concealment moments, the dark nights of our souls, when we’re sitting in doubt, when we’ve got confusion, if we can potently hold that vigil candle, it’s figurative, in those moments then we can trust that it will be revealed, that the illumination will happen.
Rick: So in other words, something good is happening, keep that in mind.
Kimberly: Yes, thanks for making that really simple. I’m like, you talk about . . . you say talk a lot. My dad said to tell you, he said, “Don’t ask her to tell you how the camera works because you’re going to get the history of cameras.”
Rick: That’s funny. And you know, on this whole point about ethics and this and that, I just want to say, there’s that phrase, “What would Jesus do?” And my response to that was, well you kind of have to be Jesus to know that, and if you’re not Jesus, then you’re only going to be able to do what you do and what you can do, given your level of consciousness, your level of development. It’s hard to emulate a higher level of consciousness. I mean, even just as it’s hard to like, I don’t know, I can’t ski like Lindsey Vonn. You have to be Lindsey Vonn to ski like that, having had that development.
Kimberly: Right, right, and if we can bring a respect into what’s most helpful for each human being and for ourselves in the moment, then I feel that we’re being wise.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Another thought that comes to mind here is that, talking about dark nights and this and that, I kind of feel this might tie into the notion of free will. You know, some people say we don’t have any whatsoever. My impression is that we do, but there’s a certain, out of the whole spectrum of possibilities, we occupy a certain portion of it, and there’s a certain amount of wiggle room within that spectrum where we can kind of guide it this way with our intention, and if we do we gain greater freedom, or we can guide it that way with our intention by doing certain things, and if we do, then we diminish our freedom, we become even more bound and lost. Would you concur with that, maybe?
Kimberly: Yeah, I think that’s a nice . . .
Rick: Not that you need to.
Kimberly: Right, I think that’s an interesting way to put it on a practical level. I love the question. It’s leaving me to think of, you know, one of the . . . in the Nataraj, in that statue, and again I’m not . . .
Rick: That’s the dancing Shiva.
Kimberly: Anyone’s . . . the dancing Shiva, you know one of the acts is the willing, and I feel that when we are truly free we will seamlessly and effortlessly. So the more we are . . . we realize ourselves that we’re a soul, and as a soul we’re having this expression, the more we actually realize that in the deep sense of the word, then we free will everything. It’s like when people feel that they’re participating in the creation process, a lot of people talk about manifestation and there’s a whole dilemma around the whole . . . there’s truth to the law of attraction and there’s a lot of confusion around all of that too. So I would focus much more on the freedom that as human beings we’re meant to be free, and when we attend that personal growth then all we will comes to be, because all we will is aligned with the force of what we are. And you spoke to it, I think, well in a practical way that we’re participating in that, but we’re not quite wholly there yet.
Rick: Yeah, well one interesting direction we could go at this point, with this point, is if God is omnipresent, let’s take that as an assumption for the moment, if he’s not then that’s another question, where is he hiding, you know, and how did he manage to not be in some other . . . in this section of the universe. But if God is omnipresent then God alone is, and of course Vedanta says that kind of thing. And if God alone is, then we are that, and Vedanta says that too, Tat tvam asi, and if we are that then how come we perceive ourselves as being something other than that, as being isolated and individuated, and can we rise to a state in which we know ourselves to be that, and when we do then what guides the impulses of our individual life?
Kimberly: I love what you just spoke to. If I were to give a definition . . .
Rick: If there is an individual life anymore.
Kimberly: Right, right, well I think that this aspect of form is a celebration of the multifaceted consciousness, so if I had to give a definition of God, I’ve come to: God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Rick: Beautiful
Kimberly: So in that I feel that we’re just at the beginning stages of realizing what that even is.
Rick: We as a species?
Kimberly: But it’s there in the consciousness because we’re speaking to it and oftentimes when we hear it, like when I say that, I feel so much joy run through my body, so there’s a coming home feel. So as we realize it then why would it not be possible for that which is inevitable and formless to have a celebration in identified specific objects?
Rick: Yeah
Kimberly: The construct, the dilemma is just simply in our mind because we don’t actually realize what that means yet. The conflict doesn’t exist if God is that, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. There’s no conflict there because there is a powerful willing that could have a celebration as identified objects that are in a dance. We’re in a dance right now in our conversation.
Rick: Now some people might say that sounds kind of airy-fairy or nicey-nicey and what about the Holocaust and what about the Parkland High School shooting and all the horrible things that happen in the world. If it’s all God, how do you explain that stuff?
Kimberly: I am so with you and it’s devastating. I suppose the presence of God in that is when we as human beings awaken into the atrocious ways we act in the name of some high ideal and that is God present there. But that a God allowed or willed, I can’t give an answer to that. I can only speak to the experience that I experience God when compassion becomes embodied and I can understand the aberration because our biggest dilemma is our thinking we’re separate and then the survival thrust that goes into preservation that’s fueled by separation. You know, I need to preserve this, you know, this is for the highest good and at heart there’s something, even though it’s very demented when it’s acted out in the Holocaust, at heart the essential movement to want to preserve the highest good is something that’s the noble part of being human. It is just completely deluded because it’s forced by the biggest misunderstanding of all and that there is separation around all of this. So in a way that huge devastation and no and all of those things is this shake up that we’re off track.
Rick: So you may have just answered this question but maybe you could rephrase your answer. Would you feel comfortable saying that if you could zoom out far enough and have enough wisdom you could see the evolutionary potential in any situation or event no matter how horrific?
Kimberly: Yes, I do. And I know that that’s a stance, and I know that I could find myself wrong because life may teach me something different. But yes, at this point my experience of reality is so much the pulsing-ness of God that I couldn’t say something that would contradict that and I would be contradicting it if I had any other stance right now.
Rick: Yeah, well it’s interesting because some people lose their faith in God when confronted by terrible things like that, they say, “Well God couldn’t possibly exist or this wouldn’t happen.” But I would say that as difficult as it may be it necessitates a deepening of one’s understanding of what God actually is and a clarification, perhaps a maturation out of a simplistic notion of some bearded wise guy in the sky to something much more imminent, much more sort of omnipresent in every particle of creation and orchestrating this play, and like all plays it has its ups and its downs and its tragedies and its triumphs.
Kimberly: And I think if we believe at essence that we’re eternal it brings in a whole different world perspective too, and a whole different look at why we’re here, and the reincarnation notions and that. One of the things I really liked about “The Shack” you know, the movie that came out and the book.
Rick: I don’t think I saw that, so maybe others haven’t also.
Kimberly: I think it’s Paul William Young, I spoke at a conference. Interestingly he was a big speaker at a big progressive Christian conference and I mainly am brought in to speak in non-Christian environments anymore.
Rick: You make the Christians nervous.
Kimberly: I do, but I know but they chose me to speak here too, which I was very honored. But I really appreciate his exploration of this notion of God and I saw him at a Trinity conference too, right next to Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr. He had the Trinity, so the Trinity is at the force of this book, the relationship of this man in the face of the loss of his daughter who was abducted and it’s just terrible. And the God part, so there was a Jesus figure, a spirit figure and a God figure. The God figure won’t enter into his line of reasoning of why did you let this happen? And I thought that was really compelling that Paul represented the formless part of God as, you’re not speaking my language. I’m here for you, I am a hundred percent here, but you’re just . . . until you can speak my language you’re not going to be able to hear the answer. And so I think that speaks to what you’re saying.
Rick: In other words, people might try to shoehorn God into a . . . Cats love to get in boxes, right? And we used to have this cat that would try to get herself into this little tiny box and she couldn’t fit, and every which way she tried she wouldn’t fit. It was a hilarious thing to watch. But I think a lot of people try to do that with God, they try to kind of squeeze God into their concept rather than expanding their concept to potentially appreciate, even if one can never fully do so, what God actually is.
Kimberly: Right, right, and you spoke to it with the quote earlier too, I think when our path undoes us and breaks us out of our languaging and our leanings, then I think we are coming into wholeness.
Rick: There’s a question that came in that I think will fit at this point in the interview. Florence from New York asks, “You mentioned living inspired by spirit. Do you propose to do that through a deep sense of what feels right or do you do this through direct transmission? I would say that comes through hearing or seeing or knowing through a divine moment. How do you achieve that?”
Kimberly: How do you achieve that? I think achieving that’s individual for us. Living inspired by spirit I would say is the opening up‚ now this is again operating on my theology, Florence, and I accept that it has some definitions to it. But my experience is that at my very center is spirit. John of the Cross eventually came to the deduction towards the end of his life, he said, “The soul’s center is God.” Not is like God or has God or is experienced, but is God. And every time we make a choice to open to that experience, so it could be through the senses because we’re sense creatures, it could be through the letting go in our minds, it could be . . . my love is the practice of meditation and contemplative practice, I find silence is the place where we touch, taste, and begin to embody the spirit that’s at our center. And as we do that then our minds become mature in the knowing of how to be open to it moment by moment and how to ask the questions that keep us open. So it’s kind of like this delicate dance that in the beginning we’re clunky around, because we’ll have an experience and then we want to hold on to it, we all want to do that, or we’ll be undone and we’ll get confused and we’ll back away from what spirit may be wanting to reveal to us. So we have this dance, but slowly over time and in direct proportion to our willingness to surrender into this silence of our being, so our intentionality is perhaps the biggest lever that can lead us to that achievement, in that we are reshaped to discover, taste, touch and live an inspired life in spirit. And I love myself to involve all the senses, so coming into the silence I also love experiencing that even in this conversation I feel like I’m in . . . it actually makes me want to well up a little bit . . . I feel like I’m in a matrix of silence even though we’re having a conversation.
Rick: Sure, yeah. I bet you feel that even when you’re doing something intense. I feel like it when I’m playing pickleball which is this intense fast-paced, quick reaction time sport. It’s partially enjoyable because of the juxtaposition of the silence with the intense activity.
Kimberly: I’ll have to Google pickleball, I’ve never heard of it.
Rick: I’m sure it’s all the rage in Boulder. It looks simple at first but when you start getting to higher levels of it, it’s very challenging. But anyway, anything like that, the silence in the midst of activities kind of stirs up a lot of bliss, don’t you think?
Kimberly: It does and it’s informing. So there is a feeling quality and I think attending the fact that it leaves us feeling good is the candy that gives us the courage to surrender even more, so that the parts that are scared or resistant to living a life in spirit can realize it’s safe to do it and it’s going to end well and I’m not going to be obliterated as a human being or I’m not going to be forever alone. And Florence, you can always connect with me too at my website and that I have lots of ways. I love building relationship and exploring that question more deeply and being a help, a facilitator.
Rick: Yeah, now meditation came natural to you. You’ve been doing it in a way, one way or another, since you were a child and I’ve been doing it since the 60s and if I had been left to conceptualizing as a way of growing into all this I think, I don’t think I’d still be alive anymore, but I think it would have been very frustrating. So here’s a question that came in from somebody named Kranti in Baltimore who said, “I am a beginner in meditation. My practice involves being aware of my thoughts. I have noticed that the effectiveness of a session depends on how active or tired I am, time of day, mood, etc. What is it that is being aware of the thoughts and why is it affected by those external factors?” I would say the condition of your nervous system has a lot to do with it and that has to do with fatigue and all, but go ahead and answer that.
Kimberly: Yeah, that’s really lovely. I mean that’s a probing question, what is it that is being aware, what is the observer? And I have a very experiential way of relating to that. I have a technique that I teach called essence meditation and it evolved from my years of ritual, and then studying the anthropological and psychological structures of ritual and realizing the power that can offer support in being prepared for sitting. So those are some things that can be helpful to prepare you to enter into your time of meditation with a bit more readiness. The observer, it’s interesting because I think the observer is an aspect of ourselves that is present to be the counterpoint to the dance of presence, and in time is the gateway by which we are simply present and there is no more observer. So I wouldn’t say the observer doesn’t exist. I don’t think that’s very helpful and that’s a big statement to say. But I do think that the observer is a quality or a faculty within ourselves that we might term higher self, and as the higher self does its role of providing the container for us to grow in presence, eventually those divisions, because it’s I-Thou that’s going on here, I’m observing my thoughts, I’m observing the sensations of my body, eventually the experience of being dissolves even that I-Thou away and the observer disappears and is no more. So not that the observer is not incredibly important as a quality of who and what we are.
Rick: Yeah, I want to reiterate what you just said in slightly different words but I think it’ll be the same point. Which is in answer to Kranti’s question, if you’re observing your thoughts, fine, but then there’s a threefold structure there. There’s the observer, there’s the observed, the thoughts, and then there’s a process of observation by your nervous system, your mind by which you’re able to experience thoughts. If you could meditate in such a way that you were to observe a thought but observe it in its subtler and subtler and subtler and subtler impulses, you’ll reach a point at which the thought disappears and that threefold structure disappears as well and there’s no longer . . . all that’s left is pure consciousness without any observation and that’s what they call Samadhi. So you might want to look into the possibility of that.
Kimberly: Yeah, and I think the word “allowing” is really operative there. When we observe . . .
Rick: Effortless.
Kimberly: Yes, when we observe so often we can come in as an identity. So there’s this stance of observing and allowing all of what you just shared to expand within ourselves and then there’s the observing that leaves us in a stance, “Oh, there’s my thought,” and we can tell when we’re creating a rigidity in relation in our meditation and when we’re creating and allowing that that allows that dissolution to happen and that’s a wonderful practice to take it to that level.
Rick: Yeah, and you know Kranti was mentioning being tired or the quality of her meditation varying according to what was going on during the day and things like that. I find it helpful to lie down take a little nap before I meditate in the afternoon just because then any superficial fatigue that would cloud the process has been eliminated. But you know you have to kind of . . . the body is like a vehicle or an instrument through which this experience or any experience can happen and so the instrument has to sort of be functioning properly for the experience to be clear.
Kimberly: Yeah, and if you’re interested in some tools and techniques that can help with that just email me, I have a huge toolbox that can offer what might work best for you. But in addition to that I think that showing up for meditation has its own power to it that even when we’re tired I know it can feel or seem like the quality of the meditation is not as good. We didn’t do as well or it’s not as good. But I don’t buy that because I think that ultimately when we choose to meditate it is because spirit within us is wanting the experience. So we may think we’re choosing to take on a practice but I think it’s a deeper unconscious consciousness that’s moving us into the practice and that is where there is faith for me that’s happening and it’s not on my shoulders. I participate but it’s not . . . ultimately I’m becoming the power source, I am not the power source there.
Rick: Yeah, that’s very well put, I appreciate that. It’s almost like you don’t do meditation or you don’t do enlightenment, you know it’s not something you get to by pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s more of a surrendering into a larger intelligence than it is any kind of individual motivation or intention would you say?
Kimberly: Right, I definitely think that, yes. And there’s a great . . . I’m totally paraphrasing this quote so it’s probably very different from reading it from the book, but I love in Augustine’s Confessions and he says to this effect, because he was a Manichaeist so he was very big into dualism, into evil being in material, caught in the material and light needing to come about through . . . He had a very sophisticated spirituality if you will, before he became Christian and he brought all that into his Christianity, all that dilemma. But he says this phrase at one point when he had been really broken open and he said, “Late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved you. I ran through the streets shouting for you. I talked about you to everyone. I could not find you and then you shattered my deafness and I found that you were already always within.”
Rick: Wow, that’s beautiful.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rick: It’s really cool. So, let’s get back to your story a little bit. So you went through this thing and you told us about earlier and you’re really kind of on fire and then somebody put the St. Teresa book in your hands and then you read St. John and so on, and then one thing led to the next and you ended up getting into this monastery and living there for how many years?
Kimberly: Ten and a half years.
Rick: Ten and a half years and it sounded interesting, lots of good food it sounded like to me. I kind of figured you’d be eating dry bread and water but you guys really laid it on.
Kimberly: You’re right, I mean we did fast, we really did some big fasts but you know living off the land.
Rick: North Dakota.
Kimberly: North Dakota, there was a celebration of the census. And we farmed the land and I don’t know that I . . . I love still to cook but I don’t know that I’ve eaten so well as I did in North Dakota.
Rick: Yeah, it was kind of mouth-watering reading your book and describing the things you guys cooked.
Kimberly: You’re getting it from a foodie too, so you’ve got my lens going on there.
Rick: Yeah, one could read your book to find out what it was like living in that monastery and it was very regimented and you got up at midnight to pray and you got up early in the morning and there was a lot of time spent in prayer and meditation. You can say something more about this if you want but I want to fast forward to how and why you left. But you want to say anything more about what it was like being there before we get to that?
Kimberly: There was something incredibly symphony-like in living in silence. Part of me, the mature and the immature part of me, because we’re always this kind of interplay of both those things going on, rejected this idea of being put in a box. I couldn’t stand it in my late teens, like don’t put me in a box, but I also didn’t want to put other people in boxes and part of my intuitive knowing in that was that once you put in a box, you set up a box that needs to be healed and transcended or shattered or changed and I really wanted to challenge myself to live a life that was not being put in boxes or putting people in boxes and the lifestyle there afforded that because of the amount of silence we lived in. You know, when you’re left alone to your own thoughts on things and when you’re opened up to the intuitive psychic relationship to those around you, it opens up all your senses in a lot of different directions and there was something really, really powerful. There was something very miserable when parts of me that needed to be healed were operative. You know, there’s nothing like a greater hell than being stuck in silence by yourself and you can’t put a radio on or call a friend.
Rick: Solitary confinement is considered one of the most serious punishments.
Kimberly: I think it’s unethical to ever impose that on somebody, especially somebody. . .
Rick: Especially someone who has no recourse to inner fulfillment.
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like send them on a meditation retreat is my solution. But then you also open up these other avenues of the Self, capital S, and so it was a perfect fit for me and never ceased in all its ups and downs, never ceased to be like a honeymoon for me for the ten and a half years. So it was a dramatic series of events that led to my leaving because I never would have thought of leaving.
Rick: Yeah, so what was that dramatic series of events?
Kimberly: In short term, because my second and my third book that are written that will be coming out in a little bit, they give a really wonderful immersion.
Rick: Right, we give some little teasers for the book.
Kimberly: I’ll give you some teasers, I’ll give you that, right, because yes, it’s all the little things that lead us to the big things. Well I was asked to join a community down in Texas and the first book ends that way and that community was very small, it was very different. You know, we were in a converted house, there were only four other nuns, all four of those nuns were 20 years older than me. We had to truncate all our ritual, my love was the chant and ritual, and just because of what it takes to keep a monastery going we had to truncate the way we did ritual. So it was beautiful and it was in one way freer of the amount of discipline in the obedience part, it was much freer than that. So in that way it was more contemplative, more breathing space, but in another way it had less structure, less of the gateways into the things that I loved. But about a year into being there, and you can see this in my TEDx talk because I share it there, I was out back and I was really hungering for solitude because with our house on the outskirts of town we were getting the doorbell rung all the time and it was beautiful.
Rick: Was it fundamentalist Christians trying to convert you?
Kimberly: No, they were our friends who loved us. It was a largely Hispanic culture and you know, so there were people wanting to bring us things.
Rick: Bring you pies and whatever.
Kimberly: Uh-huh, and there were also tons of people coming for prayer. I had some very dramatic prayer experiences with people, but it was more like we were part of the community, whereas North Dakota was really contemplative where you rarely saw or talked to somebody. And I loved all that community, but I longed for the solitude. I mean that’s why I became Carmelite, was to have the long hours. And I was out back and I had this moment of soul hunger and it just came up like a fire in me. And in that longing for silence and solitude I heard really clearly, “Build the permanent monastery.” And because it was an answer that I could feel energetically, I gave this huge yes to. I’m like, “Yes!” But I had no idea that it meant I was actually going to physically build the monastery. I thought it meant figuratively, like we’re saying yes to building it and it’s going to give us our lifestyle back. So what ended up happening . . .
Rick: That’s right, you built a monastery down there, didn’t you? I remember hearing that story, wow.
Kimberly: Yeah, so what happened was through a series of totally unplanned events, because I was the right-hand person of the leader in that community, I was infused with the know-how to do it all and it was an example of when we say yes to the unknown and we’re given all we need. My mind was attuned to architecture, to general contracting, to the principles of engineering, to reading blueprints, to organizing hundreds of thousands of dollars of product.
Rick: Which you didn’t have any prior experience with, any of this stuff, right?
Kimberly: I had no experience. And so I was the general contractor for this multi-million dollar project that was happening without formal funding and with our blueprints, you know. And as that was happening I was changing. Gifts within me were being realized that I didn’t know. There were ways that my presence was allowing people to experience spirit in themselves, just because I was still a monastic and I was caught in this project and the flow of the project was so dynamic. So in that process there was a lot of great things like that that happened and then there was a lot of confusion. I mean I was doubted, I was only 29 years old, you know, like, Who’s this little girl? Like, how is she doing this? This must be illegal.
Rick: Child labor.
Kimberly: And so there was a lot of light and dark that happened with that. There were huge shake-ups because it was not according to any of the paradigms of how things are meant to happen. And in all that shake-up I didn’t know how much I was being changed and without realizing it, my spirituality was blasted into a mysticism that just didn’t fit that container anymore. I wouldn’t have thought that, that didn’t come to my mind at the time, like it wasn’t a reflection I had. What led me to leave was I was in my hermitage one night and I had this rush of spirit, it was an inner illumination, and oh Rick, it was incredible. In it I was washed of my vows and again, it had nothing to do with logic. And I’m walking around and I knew what it felt like to be Carmelite, and I’m walking around the monastery and I’m like, Oh my God, I’m not Carmelite anymore. I just . . . it was like being displaced and all of a sudden . . . I loved my vows, so I wasn’t grieving the loss of the vows because I felt filled with the beloved. I grieved later many different losses, but it wouldn’t have made sense to stay, there was no fit anymore. It was almost as though part of why I was there was to realize in my body and in my mind what’s possible as a human being and to bring that out in service, to be of service that others can, within their very lifestyles, taste and know that they can live from that place. Because I may be very esoteric but I’m very practical too. So I left without the storyline, this happened and that happened, and I could hinge that they were all involved because the story was the human story and the Divine story, but it was a soul move.
Rick: It was an inner calling, just as an inner calling had gotten you there in the first place.
Kimberly: Yeah, and everything . . . fortunately for me when I have inspirations like that, everything lines up. So I got a scholarship to do my seminary training and I ended up landing in an international program, so it situated me with the broad worldview that I needed because I was in Washington DC for 9/11. So come from all my solitude and then be immersed in all that chaos, I was really provided for with being with all these people from all over the world.
Rick: Did you get a lot of resistance from your fellow sisters in the monastery when you . . . both there and in North Dakota when they heard you were thinking of leaving, did they say, Oh, you’re going crazy, you’re going off the beam, come to your senses, stay here. That kind of thing?
Kimberly: The leaders, yeah. The main thing was, I’m on my way to hell.
Rick: How is hell treating you now, do you like it?
Kimberly: I’ve met a lot of great people here. Yes, yes, I’m in the large pool now.
Rick: I saw a funny cartoon the other day that there was this guy who was new to hell and the devil was saying to him, “So we’ve kind of given up on the fire and brimstone thing, we’ve covered the floor with Legos.”
Kimberly: Yeah, and then there was really great grieving. You know, the prioress up in North Dakota who I was especially close with, she was deeply grieving and you know Rick, I got it. When I knew I was going to let everyone know, I would have been surprised if I had been met, if the conversation would have been one that we would have walked away from. She was grieving because I was such a fit, I am such a contemplative. I mean I was like a fish in water and usually when somebody leaves it’s because they’re not contemplative in that way. And so her big grieving was that God was losing a warrior and somebody else was winning. So there was a lot of . . . but some of my fellow sisters, you know, we didn’t get to talk much because of the rules and I would have loved that. I miss some of them greatly.
Rick: And you can’t really correspond with them now and tell them how you’re doing and everything, right? And they’re not even likely to watch this interview, they probably don’t have computers and stuff.
Kimberly: As far as I know, I wasn’t welcome. I have been banned from different things. I wasn’t technically banned but there was incredible pressure that I was a bad influence.
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Kimberly: That I wasn’t welcome.
Rick: Yeah, well and it kind of threatens what they’re doing. If you’re going to leave and you seem to be happy about it and you’re happy even after having done it, then others there may begin to think, “well, geez, maybe I’d be happy and she seems to be doing okay.” So it kind of jeopardizes the whole structure.
Kimberly: Well, even think of my theology. I mean, if I was in contact where spirit is leading me . . .
Rick: Yeah, Kashmir Shaivism.
Kimberly: . . . would open up all sorts of unacceptable dialogues.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, you know there’s that term “spiritual but not religious.” I bet you would still say that you were spiritual and religious, but I bet you would . . . not put words in your mouth, but I bet you would say, “Well, yeah, but my religiosity is just a much bigger basket now and includes everything.”
Kimberly: Yeah, I think it’s true because I think there’s a place for the container, and for me religion in its best form is a container for us to experience the ineffable. So I think that there’s a strong part of me . . . I’m not not Catholic. I’m not Christian, only according to the way it’s framed.
Rick: Right, neither is Jesus for that matter.
Kimberly: Yeah, but the Christian-ness and the Catholic-ness are so in my cells.
Rick: Sure, it was your channel, it was the route you took, your upbringing.
Kimberly: Yeah, and I feel very blessed, Rick, because I so understand the woundedness so many people are moving through and not that I haven’t had things I needed to grieve or heal, but for the most part because my experience has been this love affair with God, I feel really, really grateful for all my experiences. You know, even at times when observance in religion has been oppressive or unethical or rigid, it’s been an opportunity for me to touch into the essence of the person that was wielding that sword, to have compassion. So I feel really, really blessed that I think my early childhood experiences have left me with that kind of inner stability.
Rick: Yeah, definitely marching to the beat of your own drummer, but not meandering erratically around the marching field. You definitely have a purpose and a direction that seems good.
Kimberly: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing that and saying that. I appreciate it, out here as this freelance mystic.
Rick: Personally, I think that all religious and spiritual people should study a little bit of astronomy. Firstly you’ll get over the notion that the universe is only 6, 000 years old, that one ends pretty quick. But then if you can contemplate, according to most estimates, how many civilizations there probably are in our galaxy alone and then how many galaxies there are, it gives you much deeper appreciation for the greatness of divine intelligence and it also pops you out of any narrow way of thinking you may have in terms of, “My way is the right way.” I mean, God is not a one-trick pony, the universe is this vast, diverse play and display of infinite intelligence with as many paths to God as there are beings.
Kimberly: I love that. I was, in its concept, I was very moved by a book called The World Peace Diet, by Will Tuttle, and it’s his doctoral dissertation. He’s vegan and his passion has been really a harmonious relationship with all of the world, plants, animals, everything. And one of his chapters is called Intelligence of the Species. One of my takeaways from it was that we have a really rudimentary idea of what it means to be intelligent and we form this construct that sets us up to say, this is the way we grow in intelligence, this is what intelligence is like, this gives us our measure system. But in it is an egocentricity that keeps us hemmed into and blinds us from exactly what you’re saying, that there could be many, many ways that intelligence is actually happening. And I even love some of the movies that are coming out that are challenging that. “Arrival” is one of them.
Rick: Oh, I love that movie.
Kimberly: Yes, I know. It’s an incredible movie.
Rick: I watched it a couple of times.
Kimberly: Me too.
Rick: Gave me goosebumps.
Kimberly: Oh, I know, and Amy Adams was amazing in that movie too. So, I’m 100% on board with you on that and I think that’s one of the adventures. When I was little and when I had that experience in my book about the autumn leaves and I realized that that is what my life was about, being and becoming in God.
Rick: Do you want to tell us that thing because most people here haven’t read your book.
Kimberly: Sure, sure. So we lived in Cincinnati and we lived close to school and it was a time when everybody felt safe to walk to and from school, so I loved walking home in the autumn.
Rick: You had to be at school.
Kimberly: Yes, and I loved everything about the fall because I loved school. I was very, very nerdy that way and I loved autumn. And it was one of those days walking home where you can tell autumn has definitely happened. The air had changed, everything had kind of quickened up, the wind was quickening up, the leaves had begun to turn, there was that very mild, mild chill in the air that you knew everything was changing. You could smell it and I loved it. I would walk home and from time to time I would get caught up in feeling the dance of nature. It felt like it was going on all around me and all of nature was inviting me to the dance. So I would actually, like a dervish, I would whirl home. So I’d whirl all the way home and one of these times that I whirled home I stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac where we lived and I was breathing it in because I was in such a deep place of bliss, I was breathing it in. And as I opened my eyes a tree across the street caught my attention, it lit up. Then one leaf lit up off that tree and the leaf had turned colors and it was kind of going back and forth like this, you could tell it was going to leave its branch. And I was taken into that leaf, and as I was feeling one with that leaf, the leaf broke off and it began to swirl towards the ground. And out of nowhere when that leaf dropped, sadness, really deep existential sadness arose within me and this unspoken “is that what life is about, dying?” came and sadness just filled me. But at the very moment, because I was in such a vulnerable open state, at the very moment that that happened time stopped and it was like everything kind of pulled back these veils and I had this direct experience that that leaf was in God and God was in that leaf. And the translation, since I was projecting on the leaf, was the experience of me, that I am in God and God is in me, and that’s all life is, that’s it. And what struck me about that experience was that the movement of events filled me with so much joy that the sadness was washed away forever, like all the traces of it were completely gone and it was within that framework that everything has kind of evolved for me. So I always felt like, well that’s all life is about, and it feels like I have this awesome chocolate cake and I just want to share it with everybody. I know that sounds very evangelical, but you know it’s kind of like, oh my God, this is the best cake ever, you’ve got to eat it! So that’s my attitude.
Rick: Well it’s a lot better than those little wafers they make you eat, right?
Kimberly: Yeah, totally. What I love about it as well, which I think is really important in understanding our growth as human beings, is we’re complicated and we can have these ineffable experiences and still mature into them, and still have the journey. When I was 19, actually right as I was coming out of that dark night, everything had happened and everything had changed and I was having the dramatic experiences. I was at a healing mass and I got slain in the spirit, which is where a healer puts their hands on you and you’re whooshed and you fall over. And I was brought back to that moment. What’s interesting about that moment is that when I was 19 and it happened again, there was this experience of Christ’s presence standing beside me and there was the experience that that sadness that had welled up was the sadness of having lost my grandma when I was three, who I was very close to, and almost losing my mom when I was four. Those impacted me deeply and I was carrying it in a cellular way and in my psyche. When I was five and had the experience, I didn’t even process that. I could have this deep, moving, illuminating experience and then have it be the place and the way that I could hold the sadness that needed to be healed when it was ready to come forward. And in that moment when I was 19, I wept the losses that had happened when I was little. So I think it’s such a teaching to me about our complexity as human beings.
Rick: Yeah, you’ve had some interesting breakthroughs. It’s like some people have fairly mundane journeys and some people have these dramatic ones with all kinds of flashy breakthroughs.
Kimberly: It’s so true. I told somebody, I said, “I don’t need to take drugs.” I said, “Life is kind of psychedelic already.”
Rick: Yeah, never a dull moment. But people shouldn’t be envious. I mean, I was on plenty of long meditation courses and people would get up and talk about all these flashy experiences and all, and I would say, Yeah, why aren’t I experiencing something like that? But we’re all wired differently and some people are flashy experience types and some aren’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re more advanced or closer to enlightenment or anything. I don’t think anyway.
Kimberly: I don’t think so either. I mean, knowing myself and all the ways I’m growing, I feel pretty confident in saying it’s not so. One of the things I love to do, Rick, when I’m working with people in groups or one-on-one is to provide the opportunity for people to taste that brilliant, illuminative part of themselves. Oftentimes, because of the stressors that people are holding in their minds and their views of themselves, some of what’s really flashy and incredible that’s going on is missed. They’re just not letting themselves taste it. They’re not letting their minds and hearts and bodies go there. And I love to actually celebrate other people and then they walk away and they feel it so much that they’re taken away from looking outside themselves to what somebody else may have to offer them.
Rick: Interesting. I don’t know whether it was you or somebody else or something else I was reading or listening to about the thing of looking outside, looking outside, looking outside and then kind of hitting up against the wall and being turned around 180 degrees. I’m sure you’ve had this, but there was some interesting story around this that I just read recently.
Kimberly: Right, I think it would make sense. Again, I don’t know physics well, you know, I dabble in all these different complementary fields to what I do and I probably am a little biased in pulling from it what supports my worldview a little bit.
Rick: Yeah, we all do, drives the physicists crazy. All these new agey types co-opting quantum mechanics.
Kimberly: I know, so true. If you look back at some of the even more ancient texts and you look at the energy construct of a human being, there’s the postulation that as a human being we are the microcosm of the macrocosm and that there’s real relevance to the “as within, so without.” And I think what is brilliant about hitting against the limitation of the “without” part, it’s so logical to look without. It’s so logical to say, “Well, I’m a muddy mess, let me look to a teacher. Well, I’m not the source of all, let me look to a practice.”
Rick: Right, and in so doing relinquish my own autonomy and my own good sense.
Kimberly: Yeah, for sure. Then to hit the limitation and to have the devastation of that falling short of the expectations that that’s meant to be our all, turns us to ask another question and to open to the possibility of experiencing that we might be within the very microcosm of the macrocosm. Which would mean that ultimately our own evolution will only come about if we look within and it dismantles the egocentrism.
Rick: Yeah. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said an interesting thing one time, he said, “God may be omnipotent, but the one thing he cannot do is remove himself from your heart,” because obviously if God is omnipresent then he’s in your heart. So perhaps within oneself, within one’s own heart or however you want to phrase it, is the easiest place to find God first and then maybe later on we’ll find him everywhere, but you know, why not start from where we are?
Kimberly: I love that, I love that, and yeah, let that begin to inform how we find it in other places.
Rick: Yeah.
Kimberly: Right, I love this notion of playing with the guru idea and I want to do something really fun one year and walk around holding mirrors everywhere I go, do a mirror campaign.
Rick: In the Christian and other traditional literatures of the world, there’s a lot of mention of angels and gods and devas and ascended masters and all sorts of beings, enlightened or more evolved beings that dwell in subtler or higher realms, and you’ve had some experiences of this sort of thing. To what extent do you think that that is all relevant to and instrumental in people’s spiritual development?
Kimberly: I think it’s integral to be interfacing with the possibility of that. I think that everyone is going to have a different level in which it’s helpful to their own growth. Like, for me, I’m very relationship-like, not only as a woman but just as a lover archetype. I’ve gotten to know my personality and I love feeling connected and supported and I flourish and support others when I feel that as well. So for me being really open to the fact that I’ve got friends in all these realms and to experience them actually helping me and showing up in that is huge for me surrendering even more to the unknown. I don’t know that everybody needs that but I do think it’s really integral to be exploring the possibility. And I’ve always found too, as I work with people from all different traditions, it’s very interesting how people will have experiences of the beings in their traditions, which says something to me about the plane of consciousness piece. Somebody who might be really open to goddess presences might not be open to angels, and somebody who might be really open to Jesus might not be open at all to an experience of an ascended master of another lineage. And I don’t know that there’s a right or a wrong with that but I think it’s incredibly important to be developing an openness in knowing ourselves and having a relationship there.
Rick: It could also be the divine kind of orchestrates things such that we experience these presences in forms that will be comfortable to us or familiar to us. Someone who’s an ardent Christian would get a little freaked out if all of a sudden the Buddha showed up or some naked sadhu or something.
Kimberly: Totally, right. And you might even think that, well then somehow we’re constructing it. And I think there could be some truth to that. I think that by our way of being open and not open we form a subjective relationship with all of those realms.
Rick: Yeah, it’s not necessarily that we’re constructing it. I mean let’s say that we’re all looking at a statue and there are 10 of us and we each have totally different colored glasses on. So each of us is seeing the very same statue in different colors. So it could be that these impulses or energies or whatever they are, are just filtered through our particular lens or glasses if you will, and in a way that makes sense to us. They even say sometimes after people die that they go initially to a place that makes sense in terms of the belief system that they had had during life and then maybe later on they’re shown that there’s a more universal picture.
Kimberly: I believe that and thank you, much better put.
Rick: But it’s interesting and it’s also interesting that some people who are very spiritual completely deny the existence of any such thing and think that it’s all a lot of fantasizing. I don’t happen to agree with them but to each their own.
Kimberly: Yeah for sure. How objective can we be? How objectively can we hold a stand with realms that are definitely more than what we know.
Rick: The reason I find it interesting though is that although it can be indulged in and there are people who get really into channeling and ascended masters and all that without really being very concerned about self-realization or their own personal evolution or enlightenment. The reason I find it fascinating though is that I kind of have this sort of definition of spiritual development as being inclusive of all possibilities, really not just knowing the essence but knowing the full package of how everything works, all realms, all levels, the whole universe, top to bottom, core to branches or whatever.
Kimberly: Yeah, I love that too. I’m very similar to you. I remember even when I was about seven I realized that I didn’t want adventures that would end. I didn’t want this feeling of coming to the conclusion of something in the bigger sense, not in the small sense. And again, I think that was part and parcel with . . . part of it is the expansive parts of who and what I am as a personality, the spirit-led, and part of it was the “Oh, I had losses and I don’t like losses so I don’t want things to end.” So it’s fueled by a lot of things, but that is compelling to me, the thought that this adventure in these mystic realms, as I like to call them, isn’t going to end. You’re not going to get to a place where you go, I got it now. I got it.
Rick: I was just thinking of the little kid in the back of the car saying, “Are we there yet?” I mean, there is no “there.”
Kimberly: Totally, yeah. Right, right.
Rick: I think it’s funny, but I’m sure there are people listening who disagree with me right now, but I think it’s more realistic actually to the way things are set up. And some people I respect a heck of a lot tend to agree with me, like Adyashanti and others that there is, as far as we can see, no end point to this game.
Kimberly: Right, and I’m so on with that that I love to correlate it with the sensibility. If you think of children, like they’re playing on the playground and they’re having a great time, if you can recall a time when . . . I can do it in adult circumstances too, but our childhood memories sometimes are easier to look back on. And you’re just lost in all that playing. That’s what I feel is this mystic adventure. It’s that qualitative piece. You build a sandcastle and you push it over and you start over and then you run to the swing and there isn’t this getting tired of playing. And part of where we set up limitations from what I find as adults is that we set the end goal. We want to feel that we’re going to arrive as a human being to a certain point of illumination, but if we tap back into the qualitative nature of our being as an evolutionary being, then we can develop the inner stability to maintain that quality of life in all we’re doing, and then having an end point becomes irrelevant.
Rick: Yeah, and not having one doesn’t mean that you’re never going to be fulfilled, because some people might have the concept, “Well, I’m not going to be happy until I reach this end point,” so it doesn’t mean that you’re never going to be happy because the goal is all along the path, so to speak. Fulfillment can be very copious and complete and yet there’s still unfoldment, there’s still development, there’s still refinement.
Kimberly: There is, and I’m massacring this reference, but you can look it up and get a better read. There’s an old book called, I think it’s 10 Cosmic Powers, it’s a tantric text, and the third one in there, all the powers are feminine, the third one is the Tripura Sundari.
Rick: Oh yeah, I just interviewed a woman a few weeks ago, Kavitha Chinnaiyan, about the 10 Mahavidyas, so people can look that up. We went through these, but go ahead, go on and say what you’re going to say.
Kimberly: Well, I think what speaks to what you’re sharing is that that power is the realization, I’m going to use God terms, that we as God are God’s desire and God’s fulfillment at the very same time. And to actually realize that power as we are that, is where that comes to with the end point. We’re fulfilled because we are that desire, but we’re continuing to magnify and evolve and expand and become.
Rick: Speaking of God, we’ve been speaking about God a lot. Some traditions speak of God consciousness, a state in which one actually meets God or cognizes God or comes to know God in a much more tangible way than any sort of belief or concept. What do you have to say about that possibility?
Kimberly: Well, I think I have a non-answer to it in some ways. In having experiences as a Catholic, there was the experience of God, and I would say that’s where I grew and transformed in that. It was a direct experience of God.
Rick: And how did you know it was God and what was it like?
Kimberly: A field of freedom, and the freedom is the operative word because I would want to use the word love, but love feels too relational, feels too conditional and emotional. In that freedom was the fullness of thought, but not thought here, and that was in an experience of God. But within those experiences, my experience of God doesn’t happen that way at all anymore because that point of experience is gone because the experience of it has done away with that distance.
Rick: So, this is not so much an I-Thou relationship anymore as a sort of a unitive relationship.
Kimberly: A unitive, right, and not that there aren’t distinctions within me and my experiences, but it’s shifted dramatically, but I really esteem, especially for the Western psyche, I really esteem a healthy surrendering into a direct experience of God or God consciousness, because somehow, however we’re wired or set up as Westerners, we seem to do well when we surrender into that, but it would lead to the dissolution of that, it wouldn’t lead to it becoming the thing.
Rick: Yeah, there’s an age-old debate in Hinduism between the Vaishnavites and the Vedantins. The Vaishnavites call them the Mayavadins, because the Vaishnavites want to have this I-Thou relationship and ever be a devotee of God and enjoy the bliss of that devotion, whereas the others are more into just achieving complete unification. And Shankara resolved it in a way, he said the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. So there’s sort of the appreciation of the unity of life and at the same time within that some diversity which can stir up waves of devotion.
Kimberly: Yes, I love that. I love the language you just used for that. That speaks very much to where I’m at. I can give an example, a recent example too, where it’s fun to still play in the I-Thou realms. I was attending a retreat with the Brahma Kumaris in New York and they had awesome different little meditative experiences that they led.
Rick: What are they?
Kimberly: Oh, Brahma Kumaris, it’s an Indian order, the founder who’s 93 is still alive. This was, I don’t know if it’s all women, but this happened to be all women and sister Jenna has a show called America Meditating and she had me on back during my book tour. So I knew of them and knew them and brilliant women. You talk about women who are solitary mystics and yet in community, very brilliant. And this one we did a Pooja where we had two circles, one of the more traditional ones where you know the inside and the outside you’re facing and you partner up for things. She led us with eyes downcast of bubbling consciousness within ourselves and then bubbling it out our eyes. And then as we bubbled it out our eyes, then we lifted the gaze as consciousness to the one before us and it was incredibly moving. And I think that that gives a great example of the I-Thou still being relevant, still being a playground where we can be explorers and adventurers without creating a dualism around consciousness and the unitive nature of reality.
Rick: Nice, good. Well so let’s talk a little bit about what you do and what people can do if they want to connect with you, you know what you have to offer them and so on.
Kimberly: I would love that. Thank you Rick. So everyone listening, first of all you can email me anytime. I am a very relational person.
Rick: Kimberly@. . .
Kimberly: [email protected].
Rick: Okay.
Kimberly: And if you go to my website which is my name, Kimberlybraun.com, you can find a pathway to reach me as well. And I do private sessions, I have a number of retreats that you could join in on. I am launching a flagship course, an eight-week deep dive that I’m sending out videos for starting on Monday. So if you’d like to be added to that list you can get four free videos, 25 minutes long and the last one is 45 minutes, that are a bit of a taste of if you wanted to attend something with me or work with me or bring your gifts. And you could just enjoy them, you know, they’re free explorations.
Rick: Sure, and if somebody’s watching this two years from now this particular thing won’t be relevant but you know, you can still come to your website and you’ll have other things going on.
Kimberly: Come to my website, yes, because Rick I’m moving into the online world much more these days. So I still offer retreats but I’m doing live stream for a lot of my workshops. I’ll be leading a Tantra of Christ workshop that will live stream in March. I’ll be teaching down in Sedona at the end of March. I’ll be teaching in San Diego. We’ll be offering an immersion in Teresa of Avila’s writings and we’ll also be creating my girlfriend is a great singer and I chant as well. We’re going to create some unique chants based on her writings. So if you want to get in touch with me, go to KimberlyBraun.com, join my newsletter, you’ll get a download of the e-book. We’ll be in touch. I can send you information. You can contact me through the email address. You can give me a call at 941-284-3036 and I will always have more offering. I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing now out of the monastery for 17 years and I think I’m just beginning to chip away at the beginning of my role and my play here on earth.
Rick: Great, well it’s inspiring and it kind of inspires optimism that there are people like you doing what you’re doing and many such people all around the world. Kind of makes one feel that we’re going to make it on this planet.
Kimberly: I just have loved the conversation with you Rick. I thank you for your reflections and thank you for just following the organic move of the conversation. I love that. I feel that that was very inspired and I definitely have a lot to take away myself.
Rick: Good, so let me just make a couple of quick wrap-up points. You know I’ve been speaking with Kimberly Braun and I’ll be putting up a page on batgap.com as I always do about this interview with links to her website and links to her book and stuff and perhaps that page will be updated over the years if she writes new books and everything. And most of you watching this are probably familiar with BatGap but if you aren’t just go there and check out the menus and you’ll see what there is to see. It’s pretty obvious this exists as an audio podcast in addition to the videos. There’s a Facebook group where people discuss the various interviews and anyway there’s links to all these things on the site. There’s also a geographic index where you can find out events that are happening in your area offered by the people I’ve interviewed and we’ll be telling Kimberly about that so she can register hers.
Kimberly: Great.
Rick: So thanks Kimberly.
Kimberly: Thank you so much. I’m so honored.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll be in touch. It’s been a lot of fun.
Kimberly: It has been a lot of fun and thank you all for listening. I send you much love and I haven’t met you but I love you.
Rick: And maybe you will meet many of them soon.
Kimberly: Yes.
Rick: Good.